While most headed off to the LinuxTag event, a handful of brave KDE people decided to tackle the London Linux Expo. Read Anne-Marie's entertaining account for some of the great stuff that went on there -- including photos of the bar encounter with a friendly gnome. Also check out Lee's site for more photos. Many thanks and kudos are due to Giles, Anne-Marie, Oliver, Lee, Jono and Mark who staffed the booth (and did an excellent job), our sponsors, and anyone else who helped, including: the KDE League, SuSE UK, Nick Veicht from Linux Format, and Cheep Linux. Oh, and bonus points if you can spot the Adobe inside joke.

Comments

For those who don't want to spend a while trying to find the joke, look at the picture of annma (near the bottom). On the wall there's a piece of paper which says 'KIllustrator', but that's crossed out and written below it is 'KPhotoShop'.

Actually, the next release of KOffice will be 1.1. It was already released as 1.0 some time ago, although it was a mistake. None of the apps were really useable for anything at that time and they crashed a lot. The 1.1beta1 that was released was actually much more stable and useful than the 1.0 release (especially KWord).

You know, KDE people keeps us stuck to older versions of KDE by their kind actios ;)

1. Not giving out upgrades like windows' IE upgrades for Konq and other imp. tools/app.

2. There must be KDE-Installer to install KDE upgrades and applications for a distribution-free binary upgrades.

I know you would say that KDE works on Unices and not just linux but if you look at Netscape, Adobe Acrobat, Word Perfect, StarOffice and other commercial apps, they just work fine on Unices including Linux-es. Here we are just forced to get Mandrake RPMS!!! Oh for God Sake get us Distribution free KDE upgrades.

You pay for the huge amount of time it takes to create such binaries, and then YOU use them: they are slower.

You are using a distribution. A distribution´s main job is to get you the software we produce nicely packaged and optimized for you in a convenient and speedy fashion.

If your distribution is not doing that for you: change distribution to one that does. I repeat: THAT IS THE DISTRIBUTION´S JOB. The unspoken social contract between distros and developers includes a tiny clause saying "you distro guys take care of making the packages for your distros once many users use the things we write".

But the KDE project is not going to waste time making universal binaries: days have only 28 hours!

On the other hand: sure, netscape produces binaries that work on all distros... except they don´t, they crash in some because of incompatible libraries. And even they only produce such beasts about twice a year. KDE produces way more frecuent releases.

Wordperfect costs a few hundred bucks: pay me what WP costs, and I will hand-compile all of KDE and a bunch of other apps to be perfectly optimized for your computer ;-)

look at sysconfig module in kde cvs.
It is a kde front end to ximian
setup tools.

These setup tools look like they
might end up pretty universal -
eg kde, gnome, web and terminal
interface to them are easily possible.
Also they sould be presented as
a corba object or a web service with soap.
(making sure of security, of course).

I found the London Linux Expo rather disappointing.
I hope it was a success for KDE and the other exhibitors. But for the many visitors it was just too small.
Neither Trolltech nor RedHat were present.
It didn't surprise me really. The Birmingham Expo (which will hopefully better)is just in two months time and the LinuxTag had been almost in parallel.
The best thing was "The Great Linux Debate". John Terpstra from Caldera was just brilliant.
Good one!